My Gadget Life

I’m back to the blog after more than a year of not posting! Today I felt inspired to write about some of the books I’ve been reading lately. It’s my habit to read several books at the same time. Here’s what I’m reading now:
- Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: how intelligence increases when you think less
- Slow is Beautiful: new visions of community, leisure and joie de vivre
- Why We Do What We Do: understanding self-motivation
- Better Off: flipping the switch on technology
- Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnick

These appeal to me because I’ve been thinking about the following: creativity and different kinds of creative thinking, the speed of modern culture and how we’re all dealing with information overload, why it’s easy to motivate oneself in certain areas but not others, how to make thoughtful conscious choices about technology, and the differences between everyday life and culture in the U.S. and other places (something I’ve always been interested in). Also Adam Gopnik is coming to Harvard Books soon to talk about his new book and I wanted to read this older one first. I’m about halfway through all of the above and I think the one I’m enjoying most is Hare Brain because of the interesting summaries of research about intuition, sudden insight, and the kind of creativity that comes with patience and stillness.

Given the home prices in the Cambridge/Somerville area, I thought I would never be able to buy a place in such a good location as I live now (where I’ve been renting for the past 10 years). But it happened! After 2 years of looking I found a “for sale by owner” on Craigslist that was a good deal, and already totally renovated, too! It’s the 2nd floor of a 3-decker, has a front and back porch, it’s on a quiet dead-end street near Union Square, Somerville, 2 bedrooms, new roof, new kitchen, central AC, nice hardwood floors. Here are some pics. I’m moving in the last week of July. (I’m so excited!)

OK, I finally decided to try Vonage. So far, so good. The quality is great, can’t tell the difference between it and my Verizon land line. This will save me a lot of money in long distance calls! I don’t use my cell phone that much for talking long distance from home because the coverage from AT&T wireless is not very good in my house in Somerville. So now I’m using Vonage. And when I move (late July), I’ll keep this new Vonage phone number and not get a land line at all from Verizon. My cell phone will be my backup if my Internet connection is down.

One thing I really like is that you can set it to send you an email whenever you have voicemail. Then you can go to your Vonage web page and listen to your voicemail online (and save the file if you want). So that’s cool. It also has a lot of extras included with your account, such as 3-way calling, call forwarding, etc.

There is a little box that plugs into your router or cable modem that has a phone jack on it and that allows you to plug any regular phone into it. Or multiple phones, with adapters from radio shack.

The only thing that was a pain is that when you call to sign up, they automatically send you a free router with a Vonage phone port, but I already have a wireless router and you can’t use both their router and your own without a hassle (disabling DHCP on one of them). What you need instead is a little Vonage box that plugs into your router, but they don’t send you those. (called a PAP2 phone adapter) Instead you have to buy one in a store (such as Best Buy, for $60) and deal with their rebate system (which makes it free in the end). So that was a hassle. They weren’t clear about that when I signed up and they won’t even send you the box (do they assume that most customers don’t have routers already? or at least don’t have wireless routers?) They tell you to go to a store and buy one! (crazy marketing schemes) They also won’t send you a wireless router with the Vonage port. Only the wired one.

Other than that, I’m very happy with Vonage so far. I have the $24.99/month plan which includes free long distance to the U.S. and Canada with unlimited minutes. Free voicemail included. Here’s a photo of the adapter. I like the little blue lights shining when it’s dark in the room.

Another thing I demo’ed at the awards dinner last night was Audioblogger. What you can do is save their number in your cell phone, call it, say whatever you want, or interview someone with your phone, and it gets immediately posted to your blog as an MP3 file. Here’s the link to the audio post from last night’s dinner.

At the NEASIST awards dinner last night, I gave a talk about gadgets (my gadget life). One of the things I demo’ed was Blogger Mobile. With it you can take a photo with your cameraphone, then send the photo to this address: go@blogger.com. It gets posted to your blog immediately. Here is the temporary blog I set up for the event: http://booads3.blogspot.com/.

Some thoughts from Michael’s talk:
- Control your technolust - sexy technology
- beware “technomust”
- technodivorce - can we let go of dead tech?, cabinet of dead & dying technology, library garage sale
- article: “planning for wireless in kansas city”
- user-centered planning
- expose hidden costs: training, staff time, promotion
- technology landscape: bringing structure to unstructured data, open source software, security, authentication and DRM, distributed, component-based software
- best practices for instant messaging: make IM part of your technology plan (”the millienials”), promote your screen name, add your IM name to your business cards, sig files, web site, use a multi-client, use away messages well
- report and de-brief your staff, give them numbers
- blog/wiki your planning for new projects
- be discoverable: offer access via handhelds, check your search rankings, offer RSS feeds of important content
- Stephen Abram: The Google Opportunity
- new Mac OS (Tiger) has screensave with RSS feeds built in (he demo’ed this), also Safari browser has RSS button built in
- make your own downloadable toolbar for users
- jybe.com (co-browsing plugin)
- unplug - get away from the computer!

Some ideas from Jenny’s talk:
- use a wiki for OPAC documentation: let users ask questions
- password protect your wiki to hide from spammers (most people don’t have time to keep doing the rollbacks to kill spam)
- del.icio.us has 50,000 users & growing 20-30%/month
- ideas for del.icio.us for libraries: Thomas Ford Memorial Library:
Here is a list of things we’ve bookmarked recently - they show that with RSS feed for their tags. Cool.
- del.icio.us / popular/ reference: Google cheatsheet is number 1
- people use the tag: howto
- del.icio.us: inbox - subscribe to people you think are interesting
- Furl is not as social as del.icio.us - really cool but not as many people using it. They give you 5 Gb of space. When you bookmark, it saves the whole page.
- Furl tags are not public - you can only access your own stuff.
- How Joe Q. is using social bookmark managers:
Furl ideas from the public - gift ideas, xmas wish list, housing rental listings, streaming music stations, job listings, school work - save and retrieve online research, reading lists.
- Rubric and Unalog
- Citeulike.org (academic del.icio.us)
- Connotea
- U.Minnesota blogs: integrated SFX into blogs: link to SFX URL (I’ve seen this before, it’s great).
- Flickr could be a daylong session.
- Flickr great for current events.
- SeattlePublicLibrary on Flickr.
- Flickr calendar view - show when your books are due.
- make a tag for your library on Flickr
- photos of books, add comments with links to the OPAC
- more Flickr ideas: teaching 7th grade math, geography (Mappr - uses Flickr photos to do cool stuff), available for reference within Flickr - going where your users are!
- promote the Yahoo Worldcat toolbar to get direcctly to your holdings
- Technorati
- we should be making our own toolbars for libraries
- “books we like” - tagging recommendations
- libraries could add “tags” in addition to subject headings
- getting our information, expertise and resources in the mix (of social tools)
- we should examine tags and folksonomies
- use RSS to put your content somewhere else, you can appear in other people’s web sites and aggregators
- rss feeds for new books, etc.
- spurl.net (js button) - they give you the HTML to put their feed into your web site
- blogs + RSS = better ranking in Google, Bloglines, Feedster, PubSub, BlogPulse, puts you into the online conversation
- Yahoo360, 43 Things, Audioscrobbler, Last.FM, NetFlix, GPS, RFID
- http://www.sls.lib.il.us/infotech/presentations/2005/neasist.pdf

Megan Fox is giving an overview: Tools in Personal Environments: A Taste of New Technologies. Here are a few ideas that I’m interested in:
- there is a mobile edition of Bloglines (for phones)
- Personalized RSS: Library Elf (I’m using this one already)
- Podcast: Schoolhouse Rock
- use wikis for staff manuals (reference docs) (UWinnipeg Library)
- Wiki for the ALA Conference in Chicago, everyone can contribute, local restaurants, free wifi hotspots, etc.
- let your users create subject guides using Wikis, or book recommendations from users
- IM for reference (taking off)
- Dawgtel (Southern Illinois Univ. Carbondale): text message service
- Google Toolbar (I just started using the A9 Toolbar myself).
- desktop search: she talked about Google Deskbar (for Windows), but now that the new Mac OS Tiger is out, I’ll be trying Spotlight as soon as I get my new Powerbook (coming soon!)
- Bloglines bookmarklet
- Yahoo MyWeb
- A9 toolbar: just got this myself yesterday
- idea: take a photo of the library’s new books, put it on Flickr, and link to the new book list on the library’s web site

There is a lot more, but I just wanted to capture a few thoughts for myself here.

I’ve been coming across info lately about videoblogging. Cool! I’m going to try Ant as my program to subscribe to and download video:

And “mefeedia” allows you to tag video (just like Flickr). Cool!

Here’s my del.icio.us tag for videoblogs: http://del.icio.us/nic221/videoblogs

Check out Google maps combined with Craigslist for housing searches:
http://www.paulrademacher.com/housing/

This is really cool. You can see all the listings in Craigslist on the map and immediately get a visual idea of where they are as you are browsing through the listings. This is great!

I’m working with the NEASIST Program Committee on our spring program about various new technolgies that libraries are experimenting with. Just finished a bibliography for the event. And we have a blog. I just love all this stuff: rss, syndication, podcasting, social bookmarking, etc. I’ve been feeling so many “wows!” and “aha’s!” lately when I try all these new tools. It seems like we’re in a period of more intense and quick change (than usual) with Internet technologies these days. It’s fun!

Friday night David and I went to a free concert by the Boston Village Gamelan. If you’re not familiar with what a gamelan orchestra is, here’s the definition from “answers.com.”

gamelan: An Indonesian orchestra composed mainly of tuned percussion instruments such as bamboo xylophones, wooden or metal chimes, and gongs.

I heard them play once before at First Night a few years ago. This concert was more interesting than the one I remember because it included singing. What was really fun was watching a group of 4 men seated in the back who sang and clapped rhythms for certain sections and a young boy (maybe 6 years old) who sang and clapped with them. He was good and obviously having such a good time!

Also there were quite a few kids in the audience and since it was fairly informal, they laid on the floor in the front and drew pictures or stared at the musicians (who were also sitting on the floor). It was fun looking around at the audience and listening to the music.

Here is a sound sample (not of this concert, but of some gamelan somewhere on the Internet): http://alek.zipzap.ch/gamelan/s/jawa_sm.wav

Yesterday, Daria and I did our first kayak of the season. The weather was so perfect! It felt so warm (70!) after freezing in the 40s the day before. At Charles River Canoe and Kayak you can rent a double kayak for $15 per hour. So we did that for a couple of hours. It’s a really fun way to get out in nature and get a bit of exercise. What does this have to do with gadgets? Nothing… except that it’s good for a gadget freak (like me) to get out from behind the computer and get a bit of fresh air and exercise!

Last night I went with a group of friends to see a play written by Pat Gabridge (my friend and coworker’s husband) called Blinders. It’s a political satire about the “scientific” discovery of 2 supposedly identical human beings and the lone reporter who sees that they aren’t really identical. It’s sort of an Emporer’s New Clothes theme, and very timely, even though it was written a while back (1997 or 98?). I thought of the corporate media and how so many lies are portrayed as truth with everyone jumping on the bandwagon of what’s popular. When chatting with Pat after the play he mentioned that he thought at the time he wrote it that it would be less relevant in the future, but instead it’s become more relevant. (sadly) It touches upon everything from presidential debates, to the pope, to believing in your own vision in a time of mass brainwashing. I highly recommend it! It’s at the Boston Playwright’s Theatre…. Out of the Blue Theatre Company.

Tonight I went to a wonderful concert by the “radical vocal trio” called “Charming Hostess.” I was intrigued, because I love a capella singing, and I sometimes miss the old days when I used to do a lot of choral singing myself. They were excellent, combining rhythmic breathing, clapping, tapping, and sounds, with very tight harmonies from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, mostly. You can hear some samples on their web site…. but the songs they did tonight were actually much better than those samples.

Check out my photos from the antiwar rally yesterday:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nic221/tags/antiwar/show/

Also posted some of them to Indymedia:
http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/display/34057/index.php

I’ve been enjoying working with Indymedia Boston lately. Lots of fun people, lots going on! Eventually we’ll be working to improve the web site, and maybe even get a Podcast going for the site. See: http://boston.indymedia.org/

By the way, all these photos were taken with my little Nokia camera phone. It’s quite handy for snapping quick shots while walking around. No need to mess around with settings or fumbling with a big camera. Just hold up the little phone and shoot!

So last night I finally had time to play around with Flickr - you know, the trendy photo service that lets you “tag” your photos (i.e., personal metadata), and then search by tag to see just your own photos, or everyone else’s too. You can make up any tags you want and assign as many as you want to each photo or group of photos.

The thing that really made me want to try it, was the fact that you can set up an RSS feed for any of your tags. Now that is really cool! So it means that you can provide a feed that contains photos based on a certain subject or word and whenever you add new photos to Flickr with that tag, your readers who have subscribed to your feed will see the new photos.

Here’s my Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nic221/

So for example, here are the feeds for:

• my whole Flickr site: RSS feed | view photos
• just the tag “friends”: RSS feed | view photos
• just the tag “glass”: RSS feed | view photos

I don’t have very many photos uploaded yet, but I’ll gradually add them. I can see right now that I’m going to want a paid account…. the free one only let’s you make 3 “sets”, and I want lots of sets. Though of course you could just use the tags as virtual sets, but I like the “sets” feature for grouping photos into albums.

Also, this makes me want to get a “real” digital camera… I only have my Nokia camera phone…. it takes OK photos, but not great or high resolution… it’s very basic. Another gadget I want to buy!

My sister has a blog called Living Better Cinematically, where she writes reviews and descriptions of “ephemeral films.” (She collects them). Here’s the subtitle of her site: Reviews of film ephemera, including such things as educational films, industrial films, military and propaganda films, tv commercials, movie trailers, shorts, experimental films, and movies made for non-mainstream audiences.

It’s pretty cool. Check it out. Many of those films are freely available to download from sites such as the Internet Archive.

This weekend I saw the movie, Born into Brothels, with my friends, Eva and Evelyn. It’s a wonderful documentary about a photographer living in the red light district of Calcutta, who gets to know a group of children of prostitutes and teaches them photography. It’s really great to see the faces of the kids light up when they have an exhibition of their work in their own city. It’s so great to see someone treat them with respect, help them develop their skills, and in spite of terrible circumstances of their lives, they get a chance to express their own artistic vision. It’s a good example of the role art can play in anyone’s life, especially as a way to deal with difficult circumstances.

Check out the Kids with Cameras web site for more infomation about the project.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a magnet party. My co-worker, Christine, invited people over to her house to learn ways to make really great magnets with glass, glue, and magnets.

Here’s an example of the type of magnets we made.

I used the “index” print from some recent photos that I sent to an online photo service to be printed. You know, the tiny little samples of each photo? They were just the right size to make some cute, little magnets that were actually photos of my friends. I also used some abstract art cards and little Japanese stickers.

This was so fun… I want to make lots more magnets!